What is your business?

Blood Orange Film is a video production company specialising in adverts, branded content and music videos. Over the last year I've produced TV adverts for national charities such as the British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK and Save the Children. I have also created content for Audi, Jaguar Land Rover and Sky and worked with some Old Felstedian businesses.

What inspired you?

I genuinely love making videos and that is the main reason I do this. It’s something I’ve done since I was very young and have managed to mould it into a career. Digital video advertising is a rapidly increasing tool and on average advertisers are now spending 85% more on digital video than they were two years ago. Companies can create small budget content utilising YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to get a video seen by millions of people for a fraction of the cost it takes to produce a conventional TV advert. It’s an exciting, emerging market and I’m really enjoying being a part of it.

How did you get the company established?

After university and working for three years at advertising agencies, I decided to work on Blood Orange Film full-time in June 2015 and make use of everything I had learnt. My former boss took me for breakfast on my last day and gave me some invaluable advice on what areas to focus on first when starting up a successful business. Following that, I then took the time to contact a lot of companies and started to build up a portfolio to present to potential clients.

What skills have you found useful?

Being extremely vigilant has helped and when you are running your own business it becomes very obvious that if you don’t do the work, it’s not going to get done. It’s a pretty daunting concept to have everything in your own hands but it’s certainly motivating when you don’t have anyone to fall back on. From about the age of 10, I started making videos, editing on DV tapes, Windows Movie Maker and breaking my parents’ cameras, but I have received no formal training in terms of practical video production skills. So my love of doing this runs pretty deep.

Do you have any words of wisdom for other young entrepreneurs?

‘Work hard and be brave’. I stole that from someone else, but I feel like it is a good mantra to live by as you have to believe in yourself and take risks, otherwise you'll plateau. When you start out you might see similar companies thriving and think there is no way I can compete, but you should not compare their highlight reel to your behind the scenes. Every company is faced with issues and problems that they won’t share publicly, but they all go through it. Finally, make best use of the connections you have when you're starting out and network as much as possible.

What does the future hold?

I’m currently focusing 95% on video production, but I’m planning for Blood Orange to be a creative agency covering several sectors such as film, design and web. Right now I’m looking to bring a partner on board and focus on improving and expanding the business.

Finally, what is your favourite online video at the moment?

The latest video is always my favourite, so currently the Jaguar one, but I still love them all... even the one where I got hit in the face with a snowboard!

CELEBRATION.

We made it a year! Here's quick video celebrating Blood Orange's first anniversary. A not very comprehensive A to Z of what we've achieved in the first year, there are some incredibly tenuous links in there...

I gave myself a day to edit both SUN and SNOW, due to having an abundance of unused footage I had shot during the summer and winter of 2015. 'SUN' was straight forward and fun, 'SNOW' was hell.

I absolutely love GoPro's, they allow me to get shots that would otherwise put larger more expensive cameras at great risk or not get the shot at all. Their value for money is incredible and the set-and-forget-ability of them makes for capturing some great footage while skiing. However - during my last excursion to the Alps we had five gopros rolling and captured 133GB of footage across 600 files which is about 8 hours of footage.

8 hours of footage on top of a wobbly head, or pointed too low looking at a pair of skis linking turns down the piste, with a few gems in between - this makes hell for trying to do anything with the footage. I put off making the 'SNOW' video for 9 months, it was only due to a lot of texts from other people on the trip and thought of pairing it with a summer video that I finally put something together.

My advice to all, that I will be practicing myself next time I hit the slopes is LESS IS MORE. Have a GoPro with you, but make an event of using it - if something exciting is going to happen, send someone down first to film it from a different angle, clip it to your head if you must but once it's done - turn the camera off, and put it in your bag until the next thing happens. There are obviously exceptions, when you hit a particularly deep powder run, it can be fun re-experienceing it, but after skimming through all (some) of that footage and finding mediocre at best clips I can safely say there will be no more 40 minute long piste runs captured on any of my cameras (unless we make it down 'Perdu' as quickly as this guy).

EDIT: MARCH '16. I'm still unhappy with 'Snow' so have removed it to cleanse my thoughts.

'DON'T CRASH IN THE WATER..DON'T CRASH IN THE WATER..DON'T CRASH IN THE WATER'

We have recently acquired a new integral piece of filming equipment (note: a toy). It's a quadcopter capable of filming full HD video up to 150m high and 700m away from where I am standing, panicking.

Sam trying to not ingest too much dust getting some test shots on the Italian dirt roads.

All jokes aside this is opening the doors for us to take our filmmaking to creative new heights (sorry) and be able to deliver unique content from a brand new angle. We are very excited about integrating aerial cinematography into some upcoming projects.

That's about all I'm going to say other than these stickers cost a couple of pennies each - anyone reading this who wants some like Blood Orange Film on Facebook and/or follow us on Instagram and Twitter, then fill out the form below and I'll send you a bunch FOR FREE.

Stick them on your bike, skateboard, laptop or anywhere you think it would get seen (I HAVE to say don't stick it on anything you don't own but don't necessarily agree with it).

Anyway - fill out the form and I'll send you stickers, if you fancy Instagramming a picture of your stickers make sure to tag @bloodorangefilm and we'll upload the pictures to the site.

I started AUCHÔMAGE in the early months of 2014 and a year into the company it's amazing to look back at the things we've achieved so far.. We’ve worked with some great companies and individuals, creating some brilliant content and with some great projects coming up, I'll be sharing new content soon.

When we started doing this, after about 60 failed attempts to come up with a decent name, we settled on AUCHÔMAGE, a French word (au chômage) that translates to unemployed in English. This came around because at the time I was ‘au chômage’ so it chimed personally with my story and honestly, I liked the way it looked written out.

The name ended up being a problem due to people not being able to remember it, spell it or even pronounce it...exactly what you don't want in a brand name. I couldn't just say my email address over the phone without concern that I would never see the message. I loved the name but it was time to think of a new one that wouldn't be mistaken for a Parisian dole office.

I put a lot of thought into coming up with a simple name that would stick in people’s minds without any of the problems I previously faced. I decided upon Blood Orange Film while I was having dinner with my sister and she ordered a Blood Orange sorbet. It jumped out as something different enough to not be ordinary but prevalent sidestep the aforementioned issues. After getting positive feedback from several creatives, friends and family I decided to officially make the change.

It was a tough decision, thanks to the time spent spreading the word about AUCHÔMAGE for a year and having a heap of tshirts, stickers, business cards etc that are now redundant but I’m certain that this is the best decision.

So no more “auto-mar-che”, “or-cho-marge” or “entourage” - it’s Blood Orange Film and this one will stick.

I knew that I wanted to do something different from the previous ‘holiday highlight’ videos I had done before we got on the plane. We were only in Monaco for a few days and despite having an amazing time, the footage I got wasn't particularly exciting. I decided that I probably wouldn't end up doing anything with it unless I thought of an 'edge'.

I decided to play off of the absurdity of how lavish the few highlights I caught on camera would look when strung together and make the video akin to the zeitgeist defining 80s pop music videos I've always loved (see Duran Duran - Rio).

In order to achieve an 80’s look I had to make my sharp DSLR footage look like it was filmed with a shitty over the shoulder RCA camera. There are several after effects plugins that would give my desired look but I wanted to get it to look as realistic and genuine as possible, and the use of a generic plugin seemed like a cop-out. I cropped my 16:9 HD footage down to 4:3 and edited it into the 90 second video. Then burned the film to a DVD, and plugged the DVD player into the back of a dusty old VHS player. As it’s 2014, I didn't have any spare blank tapes lying around. When I was a young, I found out that if you put a small piece of tape over the tab on a copy-protected VHS tape, you can record onto it, so I ended up ruining my sister’s copy of The Parent Trap.